At least for now.

Yes, I finally finished my third and final edit of my boo, The Scrambled Man.

And I can tell you this : I am *never* going that long without writing ever again. I have felt like crap for all of 2014 and the tail end of 2013 as well, and I think it’s because I have lacked an outlet for my overwhelmingly intense creative energies, and I am damned sick of it.

So here’s the deal : I will not even look at the damned book for a week. I vow to completely ignore the thing until next Tuesday, or possibly Wednesday morning depending on how my timetable works out.

Starting tonight, I am going back to 1000 words a day as well. It is amazing how much harder it feels to come up with the words now that I have (very stupidly) gotten out of practice for more than a month. It will be some time before I get my writing muscles back into condition.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Oh well, live and learn.

So what’s been up since I talked to you people last… let’s see. Well, the holidays happened, of course. They went fairly well. No major depressive episodes. Those would, interestingly enough, wait until the new year.

Because I have been feeling truly terrible lately, folks. All cold and lonely and detached and lost and dead inside. I keep asking myself why I do anything and what the point of my life is, and that is, generally speaking, a very unhealthy line of thought for yours truly.

But I know it can be different. I have had days when I was perfectly content with my life and viewed the future with happiness and hope instead of the cold hard terror that usually scares me back into my usual state of nonstop distraction seeking. No thought to future, past, or present. Just videos games and meals and the Internet, all day, every day, till the day I die a sad and unlettered death.

Well fuck that. I have to go back to purposeful action before I fall off the end of the Earth.

And I know it is going to be hard at first. I have lost all my momentum and so I will have to generate escape velocity before I can truly get back on track. And the thing about that is that at first, the rocket barely seems to move at all, and if you are a broken toy like me, you might conclude that “nothing is happening” and that therefore “nothing is going to happen” and it’s just “not working” and “not worth it”.

That is why it is so important to find the simplest, most basic pleasures in things. The spoonful of sugar, and all that. Sure, keep your long term goals firmly in mind. But you can’t do things for long term reasons only, not if you want to keep on doing them. You have to find more reward in the things necessary for said goals than just the cold satisfaction of progress.

That’s why successful writers view it as a compulsion, I think. You do not need extrinsic motivation in order to satisfy a compulsion. Satisfying them is its own motivation. Scratching that itch is its own motivation. It either feels good or at least stops a bad feeling, which can be almost the same thing.

I have been trying to fashion my writing into a compulsion for a long time now, but part of me always wants an “out” for everything and letting something become compulsive seems like such a huge commitment… so I have always hesitated at letting it go that far.

But all the ingredients are there. I am definitely happier when I write then when I do not. The last month has proved that amply. And when I am in condition, it’s not even very hard. By all logic, I should love to write and want to do it all the time. The more I write, the better I feel.

Yeah. Logic. Great stuff, logic, but when it comes to one’s emotional self they are about as useful as a snow cone in a snowstorm. Emotions work by their own rules.

Still, I can see myself moving towards accepting writing as a compulsion. It will be hard for me to accept the necessary loss of control, but it is not like the control I have is doing me any damned good.

I could use a little surrender in my life. I have been carrying around a big lump of pain and guilt about how my life has turned out so far and it is futile and useless and sometimes, downright poisonous.

Therefore, I hereby forgive myself for any and all mistakes of the past, and preemptively forgive myself for the ones I am bound to make in the future. It is better to make mistakes than to make the mistake of doing nothing. The only way to get anywhere in life is to keep trying till you learn. You cannot possibly learn the road before setting foot on it. There is always risk.

I also remind myself that I have been suffering from a major mental illness for most of my adult life and for at least half of that, it was untreated. Despite my brilliance, I carry a heavy burden, one that people cannot even see. So I can be forgiven for having a hard time getting healthy.

After all, my mental illness inherently resists treatment because it makes it hard for me to seek treatment. Too sick to go to the doctor sounds like a terrible irony, and it is.

And it has also been the truth of things for me for many, many years. Plus, my assertiveness issues make it hard for me to make full use of medical professionals even when I get to them.

I am, quite honestly, not ready to be a grownup. I missed a lot of the vital steps to become one and I feel that, deep down, I am, at best, around fourteen years old.

And some days, a lot less than that.

See you tomorrow, folks.